In praising police officers Tuesday morning for putting New York City on pace to have one of its safest years ever, New York Police Department commissioner Bill Bratton may have fanned the flames on one of the most troubled periods of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s tenure in City Hall.
“We have been through quite a year this past year, beginning with the demonstrations in last November and December, the street demonstrations, that led to the murder of two of our police officers,” Bratton said during a promotion ceremony inside NYPD headquarters.
With that, the man who vowed to deliver another year of a record-setting drop in crime helped re-ignite a debate about the relationship between last year’s protests against police brutality and the killing of two police officers in Brooklyn nearly a year ago.
On Dec. 20, 2014, a man with a history of emotional problems took a bus from Baltimore to New York City, walked up to two police officers sitting in their patrol car in Bedford-Stuyvesant and fatally shot them before killing himself. On social media, he said he was getting revenge for the deaths of Eric Garner of Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson; video from his cell phone later showed he had attended rallies against police brutality in New York City, according to police.
“It’s quite apparent, quite obvious, that the targeting of these two police officers was a direct spinoff of this issue of these demonstrations,” Bratton told NBC’s "Today Show" last year.
Later, Bratton said the only person responsible for the deaths of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu was the man who killed them. But he nonetheless expressed dismay at the tone and rhetoric at some of the protests and said he wanted to see more support from city lawmakers, particularly members of the City Council.
That did little to endear the city's top cop to police reform activists — many of whom supported his boss, Mayor Bill de Blasio, in the 2013 mayoral election.
Bratton’s remarks Tuesday at the promotion ceremony drew sharp criticism from some of those activists, who are already unhappy that a host of police reform bills that Bratton and de Blasio oppose has stalled in the Council.
"I am disappointed once again in commissioner Bratton continuing to link peaceful protest movement with the horrific murder of two of our police officers," prominent police reform activist Michael Skolnik told POLITICO New York.
Skolnik — who helped get the “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirts to basketball players as they warmed up before the Brooklyn Nets game against the Cleveland Cavaliers last year — added that any social media posts by the man who killed Ramos and Liu "does not mean in any way whatsoever that the peaceful demonstrations led him to do this.”
“There has not been one piece of policy since Eric Garner was killed," Skolnik added, "and Bratton continues to inflame the situation."
Monifa Bandele, a spokeswoman for the umbrella group Communities United for Police Reform, called Bratton's comments Tuesday "unconscionable" as well as "reckless and wildly inaccurate" in a statement.
"His attempt to connect the protests of the unjust killing of Eric Garner to the unjust killing of police officers is despicable and irresponsible," she said, before calling for de Blasio to denounce the remarks. "It's contradictory and unacceptable that Commissioner Bratton, who claims to want to bring people together and address long-standing community concerns about policing, continues with such divisive and dangerous rhetoric."
De Blasio spokeswoman Karen Hinton said Tuesday night that the mayor "believes in peaceful protest" and was committed to protecting the right to engage in it.
"But, as he has said time and time again, we all must be respectful of the men and women who protect us and actually help to guarantee that our democracy can function," she said.